RUTHFULLY YOURS

This past week John Kerry, bargaining from a self-imposed position of weakness, continued to negotiate with Iran, the world’s most pernicious state sponsor of international terrorism even after America’s allies walked away. It might be said that Kerry agreed to take “No” for an answer.

Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu left no doubt about his grave concerns about the wisdom of the agreement being hammered out at the behest of the Obama administration that legitimizes Iran’s nuclear program and therefore poses an existential threat to Israel.

We all should be angry right now about the disastrous “general understanding” with Iran about its nuclear ambitions. According to its terms, Iran will not shut down a single facility, will not dismantle a single centrifuge, and will not ship its stockpile of enriched uranium out of the country. Various inspection regimes and “sanctions snap-back” are supposed to punish Iran for cheating on its commitments, but those are empty threats. Worse yet, sanctions will be lifted upon signing, at least according to the Iranians. This means billions will pour into the coffers of the Republican Guard, money that will finance its current expansion throughout the region and support for terrorists.

The simple fact that will result from a formalization of these “key parameters” is that Iran will become a nuclear power and the regional hegemon, with serious consequences for our own and our allies’ security and interests. What is depressing about this failure is that it has happened so many times before, a history that should have aroused some prudence and caution in our leaders. Munich is everybody’s favorite analogy these days, but that disaster was the culmination of nearly two decades of wishful thinking, feckless idealism, and short-term thinking. Central to that dismal failure were arms agreements that in the end did nothing to prevent war, and instead armed the aggressors.

When President Obama travels to Panama for the 7th Summit of the Americas later this week, expect to be inundated with platitudes about the blossoming of democracy in the region. Don’t believe it. Repression is on the march in the Americas, and U.S. ambivalence is part of the problem.

In the White House’s lack of moral clarity, the region’s bullies smell weakness. One result is that a Caribbean backwater run by gangster brothers now has the upper hand in setting the regional agenda.

If the U.S. president is humiliated in Panama City like he was in Port of Spain in 2009, no one should be surprised. That’s when Mr. Obama tried to be one of the boys with Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez, who thanked him by presenting him a copy of the famous anti-American diatribe “The Open Veins of Latin America.”

The liberals who run California have long purported that their green policies are a free (organic) lunch, but the bills are coming due. Lo, Governor Jerry Brown has mandated a 25% statewide reduction in water use. Consider this rationing a surcharge for decades of environmental excess.

Weather is of course the chief source of California’s water woes. This is the fourth year of below-average precipitation, and January and March were the driest in over a century. The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which contains about a third of state water reserves, is 5% of the historical average compared to 25% last year. Reservoirs and aquifers are also low, and some could run dry this year.

The rapid spread of cheaper but good-enough weaponry poses a serious threat to U.S. military dominance.

Precision weapons and networked targeting have helped maintain America’s military superiority for decades. But technology marches on. New defense exporters are joining the global game with advanced and well-priced offerings, creating potential threats to the U.S. and its allies, and weakening Western influence. The Pentagon has a plan to cope with these evolving threats, but is it enough?

To understand what’s happening, consider the global automotive industry. South Korea’s Hyundai Motors became a serious global competitor by leveraging the rapid diffusion of technology, an initial edge in cheap labor, and a “good enough” product for value buyers. Their success wasn’t obvious in 2001, but by 2015 the proof was in our parking lots. A similar “Hyundaization” process is under way in the global defense industry.

A few examples: NATO allies Turkey and Poland didn’t buy their latest self-propelled howitzers from the U.S. or even Germany. Instead they turned to Samsung. South Korea’s Daewoo is building Britain’s next naval supply ships, and Korea Aerospace Industries is exporting TA-50 and FA-50 fighter jets to Iraq, Indonesia and the Philippines. The F-16 is America’s cheapest fighter; the new Korean, Pakistani and Indian fighters cost about 33%-50% less. If you’d rather pocket a 67% savings, Brazil’s A-29 Super Tucano has become the global standard for counterinsurgency. An urgent order from the United Arab Emirates is likely to see combat in Yemen soon.

The former Florida governor made over $2 million from a hospital conglomerate’s Obamacare-driven growth. Now, as he prepares to run for president, he says the law should be repealed.

In early 2007, Tenet Healthcare Corp., the giant, publicly traded hospital conglomerate, was reeling. The previous year, the company had been forced to agree to a $900 million settlement with the Justice Department in a Medicare-fraud scandal. Seeking to improve its reputation, Tenet turned to Jeb Bush, offering the former Florida governor a seat on its board of directors. In the more than seven years Bush served on Tenet’s board, the company executed a remarkable turnaround, emerging from the scandal into a period of expansion that returned it to the top of the health-care industry. Bush himself benefited handsomely from the growth.

Obama shows the fallacy of always leaving force as a last resort. Months after leaving the Pentagon nearly nine years ago, I wrote in NR (“Before They Go Nuclear . . . ”) that the Bush administration’s Europe-led sanctions strategy would lead to an Iranian nuclear weapon. Why? Because of the implicit understanding among the U.S. and its European partners that force was off the table as long as further sanctions could be imposed.

Obama shows the fallacy of always leaving force as a last resort. Months after leaving the Pentagon nearly nine years ago, I wrote in NR (“Before They Go Nuclear . . . ”) that the Bush administration’s Europe-led sanctions strategy would lead to an Iranian nuclear weapon. Why? Because of the implicit understanding among the U.S. and its European partners that force was off the table as long as further sanctions could be imposed.

The Obama administration has always insisted that force is on the table “if diplomacy fails.” But it has also insisted that strikes would only slow the Iranian program down. That’s of a piece with the rest of the administration’s approach, which appears to reject any notion of “coercive diplomacy.” The president is a faithful believer that diplomacy depends on dialogue and mutual understanding, and that “pressure” is provocative and therefore undermines diplomacy.

One of the many anomalies of Pres. Barack Hussein Obama’s collapsing foreign policy is Washington ’s growing rift with Israel , despite the two countries’ historically intimate ties at every level.

Obama’s fundamental antagonism toward Israel was always apparent: during the 2008 campaign he announced one of his “transformations” would be putting “light between the U.S. and Israel ”. Nor were his various close relationships to bitter American Israeli critics secret: Obama sat through two decades of anti-Israel, anti-Semitic sermons by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, in turn a friend of the notorious Louis Ferrakhan. There was his close friendship with Rashid Ismail Khalidi, once Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Liberation Organization spokesman. [Obama’s 2005 speech at a send-off party for Khalidid departing the University of Chicago for Columbia University is bottled up along with all his other records.] The traditional “Arabists” in the Washington bureaucracy – for example, Obama’s CIA Director John O. Brennan, who continues to deny “jihad” is a call to war against the West – bring up the rear.